Swedish police have raided and seized computer and server equipment in Stockholm, taking the notorious piracy site the Pirate Bay offline.

The site, which has survived the arrest and jailing of its founders, several attempts to remove it from the internet and blockade by internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK and internationally, has been unavailable for more than 24 hours.

“We had a crackdown on a server room in greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay,” said Paul Pinter, national co-ordinator for intellectual property crime at Stockholm County Police.

He said that Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group, had made the complaint. Sara Lindback, its head, said that Pirate Bay was “an illegal commercial service” making “considerable earnings by infringing the works of others”.

Servers and computers seized

Sources quoted by BitTorrent news site TorrentFreak have confirmed that the servers seized in the raid belonged to the Pirate Bay. Despite several sites appearing to be the piracy site briefly coming back online, it has not yet been resurrected.

Several sites affiliated with the Pirate Bay, including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage, Istole, bayimg.com, pastebay.net and Pirate Bay’s internet forum suprbay.org, have also been taken offline.

Fredrik Ingblad, a Swedish intellectual property crime prosecutor, said: “There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there. This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many.”

It is not known whether Swedish authorities also seized the Pirate Bay domain names as part of their action against the piracy site.

The Pirate Bay has been blocked at the ISP level in the UK since 2012. Users of the site have been able to circumvent the court-ordered block by accessing proxy sites, which replicate the Pirate Bay services and pull data from the main site when a user accesses them operating as a relay.

Many of these proxy sites are still operating despite the primary Pirate Bay site being taken offline, but they have no data of their own and are essentially crippled by the removal of the Pirate Bay from the internet.